Wednesday, April 5, 2017

This one post below from reddit pretty much says it all. Other than this the only thing you really need to know is that the Laowai Career Center is owned by the same Russian man (Yuri Khlystov) who brought us the deadly Gi2C China Internship Scam, the Getin2China black visa scam, and the study abroad fraud known as Wiseway Global Education... all of which is explained at:

I am naive - not dumb. I thought it was safe to trust other foreigners already working in China. I did not know they were paid to lie for this company.

What really hurts is that I quit a $40,000 job to do this because I was offered a job to earn "20,000 a month" teaching quality control standards to Chinese workers. Here is what happened and why I fell for it (you would too).

The company (Laowai Career Center) looks great on the internet but the fancy website is a well-disguised fraud with fake self-written reviews and testimonials they pay tourists and local expat students $500 to make for them. I met one of those expat students who suggested I could make $500 in less than an hour, not knowing I was there to demand a refund.

Laowai Career Center copies and pastes dozens of real ads from other legitimate HR websites and then inserts its own logo. Then they mix in a bunch of fantastic jobs that they make up - like "Earn 20,000 a month in China with a famous Fortune 500 Company working 30 hours per week - furnished apartment included - all travel expenses paid". They use these fake ads to get lots of people to send in their resumes by the hundreds. Those resumes are now sales leads and the job applicants are called and told they are on the "short list". The job I applied for was posted for a month even after they said I was hired, but they deleted it 3 days after I got to China.

A fake interview is then done by Skype where I was told I had the perfect personality and language skills for the job and they even told me they would teach me how to speak Chinese and would earn an extra 5,000 per month once I completed the language training! They told me the man who called me "Todd Walker" was the deputy HR director for HP in China (Hewlett Packard). I now know that no such person works at HP.

I was offered the job and asked to pay a processing and application fee ($299) which they said would be reimbursed on my first pay check. They sent me an original contract which I had to sign and send back to their BEIJING office located on Zhongguancun Street - yet they tell everyone their office is in Hangzhou! They also tell everyone they have been doing business for "almost 10 years" but their website registration proves they are lying (2014 registration).

So I quit my $40,000 job as a KFC manager and fly to Beijing. I was told I would get a free apartment so I made no arrangement nor had extra money for a hotel. There was no free apartment because they gave me some "bad news" that because of "political tensions over the South China Sea" HP decided not to hire any more foreigners for at least a year! But they then try to ease the pain by getting me to teach Engish to 6-8-year-old kids in some chain school for a ridiculous salary equal to $1,200 per month!

I demanded to meet the owner of the company but the reception girl said the employees were "forbidden" from giving that name. I then found it on the internet - and it is not a Chinese person, but a Russian guy linked to five other China scams all over the internet... http://tefl.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7589&p=18289

When I finally tracked down the office which has a sign in front that says "Gi2c China Internships" I met two girls who went there to pick up fake diplomas they said they were told they needed to work in China and they paid $1,500 each for them. Apparently, this company also sell fakes documents. I told the police everything and they said they will investigate. I am not holding my breath.

Here is the really devious part... They told me to lie on my visa application to say I was coming over to China to do "research on Chinese culture". They could not give me a Z visa but gave me an M visa instead which is only good for 90 days. So when I went to demand a refund, I threatened to call the cops and they said "go ahead - you are in China illegally without a Z visa and you will be arrested - not us!". I consulted a lawyer at the embassy and she said they were right. They set up this brilliant scam perfectly to trap people. And because they are in China, no foreign government can prosecute them. When I told everything to the Chinese police, they were more amused than anything and I heard one say "Too many dumb foreigners come to China". When I asked him to explain he just shook his head, laughed, and said at least 20 people a week tell them much the same story, but no victim is willing to stay in China the three months it would take to make a claim in the Chinese courts and hire a bilingual Chinese lawyer for $5,000. Shit, it would cost me another $5,000 just to stay in Beijing for those three months. Like I said, these scammers got all of their bases covered."